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New Registrants Please Read Before You Register!

Revised, March 5 2014: Go HERE for important registration information!

You Must Register to Download LightZone

Update: Effective March, 2014, you must be a fully registered member of The LightZone Project in order to download the program. See the message above about registration. Once the registration process is fully completed and you have logged in after approval, you will see the download links for Linux, Windows, and Mac in the left sidebar. Approval is now automatic. Refresh your browser if you do not see the links. Contact us if you have further problems, but please follow the instructions in "contact". The program remains free of charge. We are requiring membership for security purposes, to better track the downloads, and to help build the community in order to attract developers and improve the knowledge base. It is fine if you do not wish to participate in the forums---no one is forcing you to---- but we would like you to participate and believe that in the long run a larger member base will be better for the project, especially in terms of attracting development support. We do not think it is too much to ask that you register in exchange for free and quite interesting software. We hope that you like it as much as we do, and will share with the community your experiences, questions, and comments.

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Download Block Appears Below This Block for Registered Members!

Updated, March 5 2014: Once you register and receive your automated email (read texts and link underneath photo banner at the top of the page), the Download Block will magically appear immediately below this block. Please therefore read all instructions about registering. Approval is now automatic.

RAW Profiling Center

Our consolidated area for all things RAW for LightZone: current and latest RAW profiles, dcraw updating, and instructions for creating RAW profiles for LightZone Updated: June 20, 2013RAW Profiles and D.I.Y. Profiling

Hey Everybody! Read This Now!

Posting rules: It shouldn't need saying, but... play nice. Please keep your discussions civil. You can disagree, just don't be disagreeable. And, of course, all of the usual stuff like no spamming. Tex adds: I'll be rigorously enforcing this as we go along. We're probably going to be a small community in a little lifeboat, so we can't have members at each others' throats. This is for the sake of the project as a whole. So when you post, pretend you're speaking in person with your very wealthy auntie who has always treated you wonderfully and currently lists you prominently in her will. I won't be tossing anyone out of the forums because we are all in this together (except spammers: immediate membership cancelation), but I'll delete suspect posts right away.

Submitted by tex on Tue, 10/15/2013 - 16:55

The website is being overwhelmed! We are a small, shoestring outfit---we don't have the bandwidth. All these membership requests are crashing us. We want all of you, but let's all relax for a little while....(read more)

We love the attention, and many of you are going to love this wonderful program. But please remember: LightZone is free, and will continue to be. No need to rush! it will be here tomorrow and the next day and next week, & etc. We know many of you have had big problems today signing up, and we're approving people as quick as we can. A lot of you haven't been getting your automatic emails with your temporary log-in info. But our little website can't take this kind of incredible traffic---more than 100x normal. It's going to interfere with the downloads, too. Even we as administrators are having trouble accessing pages! So, if you're having trouble, maybe bookmark us and come back in a day or so. We want to have you and want to share this great program with you. Thanks for all your interest!

(New user) Minor idea -- I can't help much, but what I *could* do to help is to provide download bandwidth for a torrent. If your "download link block" also included a torrent or magnet link, I (we all) could download the installation file and then help seed (provide download bandwidth) it for any following newcomers.

That wouldn't reduce the application load on the main website, but would help out on the raw internet I/O. Torrents are great for large initial load spikes -- just watch any of the new Linux/*BSD releases. (Here's the live Knoppix torrent with 700 overall seeds (download sources) and they released over 4 months ago.)

Since YOU'RE the owner of the file / app in question there are no legal problems, and on an upgrade you just replace the torrent wtih a newer version (Old downloaders would need to notice and redownload again; it's not magic.) Of course nothing stops someone from just attaching to the torrent and downloading the file without registering, but I suspect you don't currently need credentials in order to download the actual file, which in effect is the same thing.

Like cbussa, I saw mention on Lifehacker, and came over, knowing that things will be slow for a bit.

The torrent and seeding idea isn't bad. Though, with the current attention on torrents, and legality issues for most content being downloaded, I would guess that there is also a fair amout of blocking happening at the ISP level, regardless of whether the requested torrent is Creative Commons or "evaluation" of the latest Windows OS.

The Windows and Mac (beta) versions are already available on torrents. The links are on the download pages. For the many folks not using torrents, the files are being served up from github.

Our load problem right now is almost entirely front-page and registration load. The biggest concern is that we use confirmation emails for everyone who registers, and our hosting limits us to 150 outbound emails per hour. It looks like almost half of the people who attempted to register yesterday never received their confirmation emails.

tex and I are considering how to deal with those lost confirmation emails, in between trying to keep the site reasonably functional.

yesterday i try to register but as you imagine, an error occured and no email was sent, but waiting until today, i "reset my password" on the login page, providing the login email address and now i'm finally a member, if it's alright for you, you can provide this turnaround to users who haven't recieve the email, just put e message on the front page providing instructions, so, people interested should try to be in thoose "150 a day emails"... little effort from you and a good solution for user (of course only if the registration process could be done in this way).

thanks for the work, i really apreciate your way of making software. thanks a lot.